Cera una volta: Rediscovering Wax Sculpture at the Uffizi
From 16 December 2025 to 12 April 2026, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence present an exceptional exhibition titled Cera una volta. Sculture dalle collezioni medicee. Hosted in the newly renovated ground-floor exhibition spaces, this show offers visitors a rare opportunity to explore an almost forgotten artistic tradition: wax sculpture in Renaissance and Baroque Florence.
Curated by Valentina Conticelli and Andrea Daninos, the exhibition is the first ever devoted entirely to Florentine ceroplastic art from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It brings back to life a fragile and fascinating medium that once stood at the crossroads of science, devotion, and high art.
An Ancient Art Rediscovered
The title Cera una volta – “Once upon a time, there was wax” – immediately signals the exhibition’s intent. Wax sculpture has ancient roots, documented as early as the first century AD in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Roman authors already described funerary masks and ancestral portraits, traditions that likely evolved from Etruscan practices.
Because wax is highly perishable, much of this artistic heritage has disappeared. Yet for centuries, wax images played a central role in ritual life, popular devotion, and artistic experimentation. From votive offerings still seen today in Italian sanctuaries to courtly commissions for princely collections, wax remained deeply embedded in European visual culture.
Wax and the Medici Court
In Medici Florence, between the fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries, wax sculpture experienced a remarkable revival. Artists discovered that this soft, malleable material could imitate human skin with extraordinary realism. In skilled hands, wax could be tinted, layered, and modeled to create lifelike faces and bodies that rivaled marble or bronze in expressive power.
The exhibition shows how Medici patrons actively collected wax sculptures not only for religious purposes, but also for their private galleries. Some of the works on display were once exhibited in the Tribuna of the Uffizi and at Palazzo Pitti, before being dispersed from the collections at the end of the eighteenth century. After centuries of absence, they now return to the museum for the first time.
Baroque Sensibility and the Body
Wax proved particularly suited to the Baroque imagination. An era deeply preoccupied with time, decay, and transformation, the Baroque found in wax a material capable of embodying both life and dissolution. Produced by bees and organic by nature, wax could mirror the texture of flesh like no other substance.
In this context, ceroplastic art became a powerful medium to represent the living body and its inevitable corruption. The exhibition’s atmospheric, nocturnal display evokes this tension, guiding visitors through a world of vanished visions and subterranean imagery.
Highlights of the Exhibition
Approximately ninety works are featured, including wax sculptures, paintings, stone carvings, cameos, and hardstone objects, with important loans from other museums. Among the highlights is the Anima urlante all’Inferno (Screaming Soul in Hell), attributed to Giulio de’ Grazia, and the famous plaster death mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent, created by the sculptor Orsino Benintendi.
A full room is dedicated to Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, the greatest wax sculptor active in Florence at the end of the seventeenth century. The Uffizi present a recent acquisition, La corruzione dei corpi, a haunting miniature masterpiece that exemplifies Zumbo’s fascination with bodily decay and transformation.
A Cultural and Scientific Event
According to Uffizi director Simone Verde, the exhibition represents both a cultural and scientific milestone. It sheds light on a field of artistic creation largely unknown to the general public and long neglected outside specialist circles. Wax sculpture, he notes, uniquely bridges popular devotion and erudite culture, religious mysticism and refined artistic creativity.
For visitors staying in Florence, Cera una volta offers a compelling reason to return to the Uffizi and experience the city’s artistic heritage from an unexpected perspective.
Conclusion
Cera una volta is more than an exhibition. It is a journey into a lost chapter of Florentine art history, revealing how wax once shaped visual culture at the Medici court and beyond. For art lovers, historians, and curious travelers alike, it promises an unforgettable encounter with one of the most surprising materials of the Renaissance and Baroque imagination.
